Complex Sites

Get Your Weekly Digest

Search

COMPLEX participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means COMPLEX gets paid commissions on purchases made through our links to retailer sites. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive.

Trevor Noah Explains How His Secret 'Black Panther' Cameo Happened

Here’s something that’s worth repeating: Black Panther was really great. The movie’s success has helped skyrocket the careers of the star-studded cast, but The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah was content with an uncredited cameo. He recently revealed just how he contributed to the Marvel blockbuster hit during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. You might have already caught this, but this is the first time Noah himself has spoken out about it.

Trevor joked that Ryan Coogler initially asked him to be the star, but then had to settle for Chadwick Boseman. He then continued the gag, saying he also turned down Killmonger, Michael B. Jordan’s part, because it would be “too many six packs.” Instead, he went for a subtler role. "I was like, you know what, I will be the voice of the computer in the background," he explained. "I'll be the computer that runs every—every spaceship you see is me. People don't notice."

After watching a clip, Noah added, "A lot of people think that I just did the lines there, but I'm everything." As in, he joked, they brought him in to do motion-capture to "play" a ship.

The cameo takes place in Panther's final act, when Martin Freeman's Everett Ross uses his pilot skills to gun down Killmonger’s planes carrying vibranium weapons to his operatives around the world. The spaceship that speaks to Ross and says things like “the lab is under attack” and “glass integrity is at 50 percent” is Noah's, although you wouldn’t be faulted if you didn’t realize it the first, second, or third time around.

POST CONTINUES BELOW

In as much as Noah can be considered part of the Black Panther cast, he’ll be teaming up with one of the his much more public co-stars, Lupita Nyong’o, for the film adaptation of his memoir, Born a Crime. Lupita will play his mother.

During his Late Show interview, Noah also plugged his upcoming book: The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library. He described it as The Daily Show’s way of providing context to the insights we can all glean from Trump’s truly breathtaking Twitter account. “We break down the man,” he said. “You can learn everything about Donald Trump through [his tweets].”

Check out the rest of Trevor Noah’s interview with Colbert above. The two spent the first half talking about the current state of U.S. politics, and the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their families at the border in particular. The best quip came when Trevor said that for someone like him, who comes from a developing nation, Trump is all too familiar, especially in reference to his policies, extreme rhetoric, and unfamiliarity with the English language.